The Most Daring -- and Dangerous -- Olympic Sport

A ski team doctor does a quick exam of Andrew Weibrecht's shoulder while the ski racer winces in pain. Training in Park City two days before the Olympics, Weibrecht caught his hand on a giant slalom gate. It pulled his arm bone out of the shoulder socket. That's the same arm that was already injured from a crash less than a month ago.

Ski racers know from the beginning that they're going to end up hurt. They know they'll have to train hurt and compete hurt. If you're a career ski racer, that's part of the job. The sport is daring, glamorous -- and dangerous.

Here's a partial list: Lindsey Vonn is skiing with the world's most famous bruised shin and newly-broken pinkie. Bode Miller had to adjust his boots so he could ski with the pain of a sprained ankle. Weibrecht was still feeling shoulder pain when he won the Olympic super-G bronze. Julia Mancuso and Steve Nyman are both skiing with back pain -- leftovers from bad crashes.

It's not just Americans. Switzerland's Didier Cuche is racing with a surgically-repaired broken thumb. Some athletes are so badly injured, they couldn't even make it to the Games. Among them are U.S. racer TJ Lanning, who fractured a bone in his neck at the end of November, Austrian champion Nicole Hosp, Canada's star downhiller John Kucera, and slalom champion Jean-Baptiste Grange of France.

U.S. ski team spokesman Tom Kelly explains, "Athletes race down a mountainside on a thin edge of steel at speeds reaching 80 mph." He adds, "I think anybody that participates in this sport is always a little bit slightly injured."

Skiers in the Vancouver downhill actually hit 95 miles an hour. And, while going faster than most people have ever driven a car, they had to make turns to weave through control gates and hit jumps that sent them soaring more than 150 feet in the air before they touched back down onto the snow.

The race courses these athletes compete on are "injected," pumped with water that will freeze and turn the course into solid ice. That kind of terrain will send regular skiers skittering across the trail and into the trees. But racers like their courses ice-hard.

Will Brandenburg summed it up before he left for the Games: "I'm excited to go to Vancouver and see how fast I can ski."



It's not about being an adrenaline junkie, though excitement is part of the sport. There's a rare feeling of perfection a racer gets from making a perfectly-controlled turn at top speed; the steel edge of the ski slicing through the icy snow, the acceleration as you press your toes and arch and heel through the turn, stomping it and gaining speed for the next turn, looking down the hill at the gates to set up your line, heading right for those gates and bashing them out of the way with an armored forearm.

The racer position is a series of angles. In a turn, the downhill knee is bent over to the boot top of the other leg. The downhill leg is practically straight out to the side. The inside hip is bent almost to the snow. The inside leg is crouched, ready to explode into the next turn. In less than one second, a slalom racer will squat down angled to one side, then stand up and squat to the other side. It has to be fast and forceful.

Skiers injure their hands and race with poles duct-taped to their gloves. Some have six or seven or more surgeries during their careers. Racers' bodies become toughened -- they can crash into steel-like netting, fall crumpled onto the snow, or be sent flying into the air and tumble dozens of feet -- and still get up and ski away. Frostbitten toes? Losing your toenails? Pffft, that's nothing; just par for the course.

As Nyman says, not realizing that he was in fact describing the reason why ski racing is so glamorous, "The choice is to push it over the limit and risk going out, or win if you can pull it off."